An intensely researched and disquieting history of communism’s growth.
When communism swept a nation—“at the barrel of a gun.”
Dikötter, an author and Hoover Institution Fellow, opens with the 1911 revolution that ended China’s ancient imperial system but failed to provide competent government or expel predatory Western nations (plus Japan) that had taken control of large areas. Still an iconic hero, revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, a nationalist, could not control local strongmen. Western nations were no help, but Soviet premiers Lenin and Stalin took an interest, sending a steady stream of advisers, money, and arms that sustained a communist movement in a “civil war,” a term that gives it too much dignity. Readers may be flummoxed by the book’s first half, in which Dikötter describes the interwar years as a period of destruction, mass murder, and famine that resumed after 1945. Generals and cadres with unfamiliar names regularly switch sides and support their armies with looting and banditry. When Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek seemed to have the upper hand in the early 1930s, the Japanese invasion inflicted another catastrophe. Fearing Japan’s threat, Stalin urged the parties to work together, but this never happened. Communist leader Mao Tse-tung husbanded his forces in the western mountains. Nationalist armies were no match for the Japanese, but readers may be surprised to learn that the majority of Japan’s army remained in China from 1941-45 and suffered far more casualties than it did fighting the U.S. Both parties accepted American aid, but only Nationalists accepted American advisers, who were outraged at the inefficiency and corruption that Chiang tolerated. This outrage persisted after V-J Day, contributing America’s reluctance to supply his retreating forces; Stalin’s generosity persisted. Mao and his communists welcomed influential foreigners, mostly journalists, showed them carefully staged scenarios of the worker’s paradise, and were rewarded with fawning reports.
An intensely researched and disquieting history of communism’s growth.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781639733972
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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